Que(e)rying the Clinic before AIDS: Practicing Self-help and Transversality in the 1970s

In this paper, I offer a treatment of “the clinic” in which the clinic—as concept and space—is que(e)ried, that is, both questioned and made queer. I present two historical case studies that queer clinical thought and practices in the period before AIDS and before the full-blown arrival of queer theory on the western theoretical landscape. These two cases—the practice of self-help developed in the women’s health movement in the United States and the practice of tranversality developed out of and beyond the Institutional Psychiatry movement in France—challenge the practice of medicine in the prehistory of both AIDS and queer theory, yet, they are not generally seen as precursors, or related in any way, to AIDS activism. In a sense, then, I also want to question and make queer the history of AIDS as we conventionally know it today by extending that history backwards and outwards to earlier queer critical and clinical practices like self-help and transversality.     

How to Be Fashionably Queer: Reminding the Church of the Importance of Sexual Stories

Abstract

This article compares experiences of working in the fashion industry with being a member of the Church It asserts that the Church's pastoral practice is often rendered ineffective by its unwillingness to embrace sexual stories and ironically demonstrates that in the unexpected context of a fashion store, where such stories were frequently shared, that there was a deep sense of trust and intimacy that allowed for meaningful pastoral experiences, especially during times of crisis. With reference to the work of queer theologians such as Marcella Althaus-Reid and Robert Goss, it employs the motif of the ‘theological catwalk’ to demonstrate that the biblical texts and the person of Jesus can be approached as sexual stories. By refusing to accept that queer people can only dress in the sexual outfit of church teachings, it opens the closet doors and reveals that in truth there are many stylish outfits that can be worn on the catwalk of life.     

“I’m Not Gonna Run Around and Put a Condom on Every Dick I See”: Tensions in Safer Sex Activism Among Queer Communities in Montréal,Quebec

In looking at the HIV/AIDS crisis as it relates to queer communities, two historical trajectories can be drawn: on the one hand, severe state inaction and neglect, which was countered by patient activism, community self-care, and auto-education movements. On the other, a call for sexual responsibilisation that, through institutionalization via AIDS Service Organizations, merged with a broader tradition of heterosexist medico-legal state surveillance and normalization; this has been countered by intentionally adopting ‘unsafe’ sex practices. As such, many queer communities experience ambivalence in how to organise, advocate, and resist oppression around issues of sexual health. This article employs that ambivalence to think about how political resistance operates. Using fieldwork conducted in Montréal, Quebec, I illustrate that for many queers, especially those involved in the field of sexual health, the course they navigate between queer political identity and safer sex messaging and materials is a tense and nuanced one. Rather than seeing this ambivalence as a sign of political failure or incoherency, however, we may see these contradictions as a form of iterative openness that Judith Butler suggests is evidence of—indeed, necessary for—emancipatory political potential. Ambivalence ensures and enables a persistent categorical antagonism, so that the boundaries of what constitutes ‘queer sexual resistance’ remain unfixed.     

Catholic Feminist Ethics Reconsidered

Taking Catholic sexual ethics and liberal feminist ethics as points of departure, this essay argues that both frameworks are ill‐prepared to deal with the moral problems raised by sex trafficking: while Catholic sexual ethics is grounded in a normative understanding of sexuality, liberal feminist ethics argues for women's sexual autonomy, resting upon freedom of action and consent. From a perspective that attends both to the phenomenological interpretation of embodied selves and the Kantian normative interpretation of dignity, it becomes possible to critique both the Catholic and the liberal feminist frameworks of ethics. I argue that Catholic sexual ethics requires a reconceptualization as social ethics in order to meet the challenges of our present time, but that the shift is possible without giving up the moral imperatives of both Catholic and feminist ethics to protect human dignity and women's rights.     

Queer Muslim love: a time for ijtihad

ABSTRACT

Across the globe, Muslim communities have developed, and are continuing to develop, a theology of compassion, non-judgmental attitudes, and support toward queer Muslims. This discourse uses ijtihadic analysis to support acceptance of queer Muslim love, because religion is a strong and deep social construct that acts as a moral compass where Muslim queers learn to feel “unacceptable”, “bad”, and “worthless” and under the mercy of the horrified gaze of mainstream, heteropatriarchy, which uses religious arguments to contest the rights enshrined in the South African constitution. It provides a case study as a pedagogical reflection to share intentions, process, and outcomes of sexual diversity workshops to support queer Muslim love to broadly raise critical consciousness about alternative sexual orientations and identities.     

Is it Really Just About Being More Like a Fag? Confronting the Gay Male Model Mantra

Although the debate between feminism and queer is by now a fairly old and some might argue, trite and overwrought one, in this paper I direct my attention to a specific feminist assessment of queer that I find to be especially unhelpful and pernicious: the automatic linkage of queer with the exaltation of a gay male subjectivity. This article is informed by my own ethnographic research on lesbian/queer public sexual cultures; specifically, two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, where public sex and sexual exploration are encouraged. I argue that this contention, that lesbians who espouse queer are aping (gay) male sexuality and subjectivity—due to the privileging of non-normative sexual practices found within the gay male community—does two things: (re)essentializes genders and sexualities, and, more importantly, robs non-gay male subjects (e.g., women, lesbians, butches, trans identified individuals) of their own agency. In sum, I believe that this linkage to a supposed gay male imitation, and concomitantly, viewing lesbian/queer sexual cultures, behaviors, configurations, and signifying sexual economies as mere derivatives of gay male culture, reinforces lesbian/queer invisibility and (re)centers the heterosexual matrix. For the sake of lesbian/queer subjects’ own viability, lesbian/queer sexualities must thus be pulled out of this discursive trap.     

Ill-placed democracy: ethics consultations and the moral status of voting

As groups around the country begin to craft standards for clinical ethics consultations, one focus of that work is the proper procedure for conducting ethics consults. From a recent empirical look into the workings of ethics consult services (ECSs), one worrisome finding is that some ECSs rely on a committee vote when making a recommendation. This article examines the practice of voting and its moral standing as a procedural strategy for arriving at a clinical ethics recommendation. I focus here on the type of clinical ethics conflicts that are most likely to lead an ECS to vote, namely, conflicts involving ethical uncertainty--or, in the Greek, aporia. I argue that in cases of aporia, voting on an ethics conflict is not a morally justifiable procedure. Then on the same grounds that I use to show that voting is ethically problematic, I raise broader concerns about the common practice of making recommendations by other procedures. In contrast to the standard approach of adjudicating between moral claims, I argue that ECSs can best resolve aporetic conflict through the process of clinical ethics mediation.     

道德脸面共享及脸面共享行为:社会关系和伦理事件的影响

用两个基于情境故事的纸笔实验,探讨了五类重要关系他人卷入三类负向和两类正向道德事件时,个体的脸面共享感受和脸面共享行为。研究1采用3(违背家庭伦理、违背消极义务、违背职业伦理)×5(父-子/女、兄弟、师生、朋友、同乡关系)被试间设计,研究2采用2(维护家庭伦理、维护消极义务)×5(父-子/女、兄弟、师生、朋友、同乡关系)被试间设计。结果发现:(1)当关系人违背道德时,脸面共享强度随关系的亲疏远近逐步减弱; 当关系人遵从道德时,脸面共享主要表现在家内和地缘关系上。(2)以孝道观念为核心的家庭伦理,对脸面共享感受影响最大。(3)在关系人违背道德时,个体更可能采用‘避而不谈'和‘辩护'行为,较少采用‘划界避殃'行为; 个体更可能因家庭成员违背道德而避而不谈,更愿意为关系亲密者而不是为同乡辩护; 关系人遵从伦理时,个体更可能采用宣扬行为,而不是表示关系亲密和主动谈及行为; 维护家庭伦理比见义勇为更可能被宣扬,后者则更可能被主动谈及。     

Assessing clinical pragmatism

"Clinical pragmatism" is an important new method of moral problem-solving in clinical practice. This method draws on the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey and recommends an experimental approach to solving moral problems in clinical practice. Although the method may shed some light on how clinicians and their patients ought to interact when moral problems are at hand, it nonetheless is deficient in a number of respects. Clinical pragmatism fails to explain adequately how moral poblems can be solved experimentally, it underestimates the relevance and importance of judgment in clinical ethics, and it presents a questionable account of the role that moral principles should play in moral problem solving.     

Sexual topologies in the Aristotelian cosmos: revisiting Irigaray’s physics of sexual difference

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no “place of their own,” rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity.     

Clever love: Dislocated intimacies among youth

In this paper, we consider the sexual and affective life of youth in order to explore the social space of emotions as understood from youth's friendship relations. Our broad aim is to develop a cultural understanding of how youth negotiate a framework and a set of practices for establishing and experiencing their sexual and affective life. We focus on the context of Hong Kong, where there is a prevailing conservative sexual culture on one hand, and an open, hyperactive ecology of consumption of sexual imageries on the other. We ask, firstly, how youth negotiate a space of relatively unregulated nature outside of the disciplinary apparatus, so as to deal with matters of sex and romantic interest, but also paradoxically face their own acquiescence to a visible degree of sexual restraint many of them believe to be proper to their pre-marital sexual period of life. We argue that the discourses and practices of sex and love within youth culture in such contexts as Hong Kong tend to flourish within, and “dislocate” into, the codes of friendship embedded in a socially-oriented consumption environment. We started out researching youth sex, but find ourselves drawn toward a theorization of “friendship” and its many meanings and structures as forms of intimacy among young people.     

谈中医认知方式及中医理论体系的构建

提出开箱式思维和闭箱式思维的概念,并以此为基础对中医认知方式和中医理论体系的构建进行初步的探讨.整体上,中医认知方式是一种宏观性闭箱式思维,中医学是一种闭箱式理论体系.     

Feeling differently together: The It Gets Better Project as an unlikely intimate public of LGBT peers

This article examines peer participation in the It Gets Better Project, a YouTube-based platform which addresses precarious LGBT youth by offering moral support. The paper asks who engages with the project, and why particularly peers participate by recording and uploading a personal video. Contrary to this prevalence of peers, the article first shows how the project's architecture actually diverts attention from peer participation to a few featured videos, thereby shifting the focus onto celebrity participation. The article then proposes the project as an “intimate public” (Berlant, 2008) of shared feelings of difference, which connects the individual and dispersed private, amateur spaces with an indefinite affective space of public intimacy, grounded materially in and mediated by the space of the internet. Building on queer critique, the article argues that the project's success amongst peers can be understood in its capacity to circulate and share emotional knowledge of feeling differently together with others, even despite its internal dominant structural and normative orientation.     

The Erotic Eucharist

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth‐century shift from an act‐oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex.     

Doing Good by Splitting Hairs? Analytic Philosophy and Applied Ethics

This article explores the connections between analytic philosophy and applied ethics — both historical and substantive. Historically speaking, applied ethics is a child of analytic philosophy. It arose as the result of two factors in the 1960s: the re‐emergence of normative ethics on the one hand, and urgent social and political challenges on the other. But is there a significant substantive link between applied ethics and analytic philosophy? I argue that applied ethics inherited important ‘analytic’ ideals such as clarity and argumentative rigour. At the same time these ideals are not the exclusive preserve of analytic philosophy and applied ethics. Moreover, they are under threat from various trends within applied ethics. In this context I rebut the allegation that the anti‐revisionist reliance on pre‐theoretical moral judgements (aka ‘intuitions’) is less rational than their revisionist dismissal. The article ends with a plea for an analytic approach within applied ethics.     

农民工的三类社会关系对其道德脸面感受的影响

探讨三类重要关系他人在两类负向道德事件中对农民工脸面共享感受的影响。采用基于情境故事法的纸笔实验。使用2(家庭伦理,消极义务)×3 (父-子/女关系,同乡关系,工友关系)被试间设计,共6组被试,每组有效被试分别为299、296、297、296、298、292,共计1778名。结果,在关系他人违反家庭伦理时,个体只和家庭内成员产生脸面共享,对于家庭外成员则不产生脸面共享;当关系他人违反消极义务时,个体则会因关系远近和不同关系他人产生不同程度的脸面共享。结论,当关系他人违反家庭伦理或消极义务时,农民工均体验到不同程度的脸面共享感受,其脸面共享的程度随关系远近有显著差异。     

The impact of child sexual abuse on adult interpersonal functioning: A review and synthesis of the empirical literature

The many studies that have examined the long-term impact of child sexual abuse (CSA) on adult functioning have primarily focused on the personal distress of survivors, largely ignoring the impact of CSA on interpersonal relationships. This article reviews empirical findings concerning the interpersonal distress of survivors as expressed in their intimate and sexual relationships. First, current conceptualizations of the relationship between CSA and interpersonal relationships are reviewed, with a focus on the theoretical models that appear to have implications for the long-term interpersonal sequelae associated with CSA. This is followed by a review of the research conducted on intimacy within the area of social psychology and a summary of the empirical findings related to intimacy functioning in CSA survivors. A hypothesized typology of intimacy functioning for survivors is suggested. The effects of CSA on three components of sexuality—sexual dysfunctions, underlying psychological components of sexuality, and sexual orientation—are discussed. Finally, the interpersonal issues believed to be most salient for CSA survivors in the therapeutic setting are discussed, along with implications for the client–therapist relationship. Methodological, assessment, and conceptual issues are discussed throughout. Recommendations for future research and clinical endeavors are suggested.     

Killing and Letting Die: the Similarity Criterion

abstract   Applied ethics engages with concrete moral issues. This engagement involves the application of philosophical tools. When the philosophical tools used in applied ethics are problematic, conclusions about applied problems can become skewed. In this paper, I focus on problems with the idea that comparison cases must be exactly alike, except for the moral issue at hand. I argue that this idea has skewed the debate regarding the moral distinction between killing and letting die.
I begin with problems that can arise from attempts to produce comparison cases that are exactly alike, except for the moral issue at hand. I then argue that attempts to produce such examples are doomed to failure. Finally, I argue that abandoning concerns about similarity advances the debate regarding the moral distinction between killing and letting die.